


The Halloween Horror of Talking About Your Feelings

by sunkelles



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: F/F, Halloween, Halloween Costumes, Heart-to-Heart, Pre-Femslash, mentioned bluepulse, past spitfire - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-14
Updated: 2018-10-14
Packaged: 2019-08-02 02:13:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16296314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunkelles/pseuds/sunkelles
Summary: Wait, she realizes, it's October 30th. The day before Halloween. Halloween Eve. All Hallow's Eve Eve.It's the day before Halloween and Zatanna still hasn't talked to her about their plans for tomorrow. No call. No text. Not even a god damn Facebook message.Artemis gets the sinking feeling that Zatanna isn't going to contact her, even though Zatanna has been the one to make their Halloween plans for the past however many years. The other girl is going to let this Halloween pass, uncelebrated, unappreciated, unfriendship dated.Artemis isn't about to let that happen.





	The Halloween Horror of Talking About Your Feelings

**Author's Note:**

  * For [titaniumsansa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/titaniumsansa/gifts).



> i’ve been considering writing a fic like this one for three years I think? Halloween 2016 then 2017 and now 2018 
> 
> The original concept for this fic was supposed to show the natural progression of Artemis and Zee’s relationship over the course of six halloweens (5 where they didn't get together and 1 where they did) but this didn't end up being that.
> 
> I had to condense the concept because I do not have the time or energy to devote to the full concept right now, but i like what i ended up with, even if it didn't even end up being what i planned when i sit down to write it. 
> 
> i'd planned to write something fluffy and romantic, but instead we got some weird character work and some angsty friendship growing pains that might end up being something more someday. i kinda like it though. i hope that you guys do too :)

Artemis frantically pulls her laptop off of her floor and into her lap where she’s sitting on her bed. She logs into the account she has with her electric company. She just realized that she's late on a bill and she has to pay that right fucking now.  
  
She pays the charge, desperately hoping that she won't be charged this time for being late. She knows that it was stupid to forget until now, but Wally used to take care of their bills, and it's hard enough dealing with the fact that he's gone from an emotional standpoint, but figuring out how to compensate for the holes she cut out for him in her life and skill set is just another excruciating part of the cycle of recovery. The cycle of recovery was already excruciating to begin with. 

She logs off of her laptop and slides it back onto the ground. She doesn’t want to think about homework or bills or anything else right now. She pushed through all the homework that she needed to get done today already, and she just wants to fall asleep in peace.  
  
She hopes that the bill is fine. She's paid a few late fees recently, and it's been alright, but she doesn't want to eat the charges again this time. She thinks that it might not even get charges this time.   
  
It was just a day, right? The bill was due the 29th and this is the 30th. She's got it all paid now, it should be fine, right? The 30th isn't all that late.  
  
Wait, she realizes, it's October 30th. The day before Halloween. Halloween Eve. All Hallow's Eve Eve.  
  
It's the day before Halloween and Zatanna still hasn't talked to her about their plans for tomorrow. No call. No text. Not even a god damn Facebook message.  
  
Artemis gets the sinking feeling that Zatanna _isn't_ going to contact her, even though Zatanna has been the one to make their Halloween plans for the past however many years. The other girl is going to let this Halloween pass, uncelebrated, unappreciated, unfriendship dated.  
  
Well, actually. The friendship date might be the problem here.  
  
Zatanna confessed her undying love to Artemis last Halloween. Or maybe she confessed her crush, or maybe just some sort of attraction, maybe it was just “sometimes I see you in a romantic context, but it’s no biggie- just wanted you to know. You’re kind of cute but it’s not _that_ important.”

Artemis’s brain short-circuited that day and she’s not really sure how big the confession went anymore. She just sort of didn’t say anything, and then they spent the rest of the night watching movies while dancing around the subject. They avoided it whenever they talked after that, and whenever they talked afterwards it tended to be awkward small talk instead of the easy banter or deep heart to hearts that they had before that.  
  
Then, a month later, Artemis faked her death and Zatanna yelled at her about it once after she came back (which Artemis would readily admit she deserved) and then didn't try to contact her again.  
  
Artemis wanted to give her space, but this is getting ridiculous. She expected that Zee would have reached out to her in some way by this point. This is _their_ holiday. They forged their friendship on Halloween as they dredged up other people’s secrets.

They spent every Halloween afterwards together, although, admittedly, none of them were as exciting as the first one. Artemis would also admit that she didn’t _want_ them to be. Uncovering one case of fratricide over a sword was enough for one lifetime, thank you very much. Going trick-or-treating or to pumpkin patches or drinking parties with the rest of the Team or just watching Halloween movies at one of their apartments were all a nice way to change the pace after that. 

But it seems like none of those things will be happening this year, at least, none of them will be happening with Zatanna.

Dick sent Artemis an invite to his annual Elder Team Members Black Out Drinking Party ™ at his place in Bludhaven, and Cassie forwarded her the invite to the official youngsters party at the Cave, but Artemis isn’t interested in going to either of them without Zee. It’s Halloween. For Artemis, Halloween means Zatanna Zatara and she doesn’t want anything else.  
  
She's bereaved and lonely and sad and she doubts if Zee's doing all that hot on her own right now either. The end of October and beginning of November is always hard for Zee because November 5th was the day her father became Dr. Fate. A rtemis doesn't want to be alone on Halloween, and she doesn't want Zee to be alone then either.

Artemis grabs her phone from the corner of her bed, and dials Zee’s number. She almost doesn't expect the other girl to pick up. Actually, let her rephrase that: she _definitely_ doesn't expect the other girl to pick up. She’s relieved that she does.

“Artemis?” Zee asks.

“Oh thank god,” Artemis says, “thanks for picking up.”

“What’s wrong?” Zee asks. She sounds concerned.

“Tomorrow is Halloween and we don’t have plans yet,” Artemis says, “that’s what’s wrong.”

“Oh.”

“You _do_ want plans, right?” Artemis asks. She hopes that she’s just being assertive and not being pushy, but it’s hard to tell after so long. She knows that boundaries can change after lengths spent apart.

“Do _you_ want to spend Halloween together?” Zatanna asks. She sounds a little shocked.

“Of course I do,” Artemis says, and it comes out way more earnest than she wanted it to, “Halloween’s our night.”  
  
"It was,” Zee says, sounding uneasy, “but we haven’t talked in months.”

“I wanted to,” Artemis says.

“Then why didn’t you.”

“I was trying to give you space,” Artemis says. Zee doesn’t respond. Artemis sighs.

“You seemed a little… mad after the last time we talked,” she adds.

“Yeah, I was,” Zee says, “but that didn’t mean- ugh.” She groans on the other end of the phone. Then, there’s a long pause. Artemis is a little worried she’ll hang up.

“Fine. We’ll talk.” The words are clipped, precise. It’s spiteful, like a child telling their mom that they’ll do what she asked but _they’re going to be_ _mad about it._

“If you don’t want to, you don’t have to come,” Artemis grits out. She doesn’t want Zee to be able to leverage this over her head and say that she “forced” her or something. Apparently, there’s been a grudge brewing and brewing that Artemis wasn’t aware of and she doesn’t want to add to that.

“No, I’m coming. Tomorrow at seven.”

“See you then,” Artemis growls. Zee hangs up and the line goes dead.

Um. Wow. That could have gone better. Artemis glares at the phone, and then tosses it across her bed so that she doesn’t have to look at it any longer. She rolls onto her side and closes her eyes.

It’s fine. Talking- talking’s progress, right? Even if it’s angry talking? You can’t work shit out without talking through it, right? Artemis rolls over onto her side and maneuvers her arm under her pillow. She hugs the pillow tightly to the side of her head with one arm.

It’s fine. It’ll be fine. It has to be fine.

She throws her face into the middle of her pillow and screams into it. She’s never actually been _afraid_ of Halloween before.

 

Artemis wakes up the next morning and has to go to all of her normal Friday classes. It feels weird, but she’s not exactly going to skip so that she can wallow and fall behind academically. She ditched enough classes when Wally had just died and she can’t really handle that anymore. She needs to go for the structure and to make sure she doesn’t fall behind.

So. She hauls her ass out of bed at 7:15 so that she can get to her 8:05 Vietnamese lit class on time, and then she stays on campus until her last class gets out at 3:20. It makes for a long day, but she has study and food breaks built in and she lives far enough off campus that going home for an hour here or there isn’t feasible.

She gets back to her apartment at four o'clock in the afternoon and flips her TV on. She pulls up Netflix on her phone and checks for a Halloween flick. She doesn’t find any that she likes, so she searches for a pirated version of a favorite and then casts that to her TV.

The credits are just starting to roll when she hears a knock on her door. The first knock is reasonable. Then, by the time that she’s gotten up off her couch it’s grown to a frantic, angry patter patter patter patter patter patter patter like a torrential rainstorm.

Well.

This is going to be fun.

Artemis takes a deep breath and then opens the door. Zatanna stands on her front porch wearing her Scarlet Witch costume.

“Hey." 

“Hi,” Artemis replies, “you wanna come in?” Zee doesn’t even respond, just crosses the threshold of her apartment. Then, she sends Artemis a scathing look as she follows her in.

“You’re not even in costume yet?”

“Give me three minutes,” Artemis says. Then, she rushes off to her bedroom. She’s not _that_ invested in getting into costume, but she’s pretty invested in getting Zatanna to stop glaring at her like that.

She throws on one of her old Halloween costumes. It’s an innocuous girly nineties outfit that she’d never wear on a normal day. It's not even really a Buffy costume, but when she carries a wooden stake while wearing the thing it sure passes as one. Artemis adjusts the shirt, and then she walks out of the bedroom to meet Zatanna in the living room. 

Zee has planted herself on Artemis’s couch, but it’s not like the way that she used to when she was over all the time. Zatanna used to sprawl comfortably over the length of it, goading Artemis into just laying down with her, cuddly and close and comfortable.

This time, Zee sits awkwardly on the edge of the couch closest to the door, nearly shoved up against the arm. She looks like she’s been called into the principal’s office with how intentionally small she’s made herself.  
  
“So,” Zatanna says, tapping her finger frantically on her leg, “you wanted to hang out today. What were you planning?”

“Um. Well.”

“You didn’t have a plan.” Zee crosses her arms over her chest, which only serves to make her look less comfortable in a living room she used to be at home in.

“We never needed one before,” Artemis says defensively. Zee sighs.

“Alright, so. No plan.” She bites her lip, then looks down at her tapping fingers for a moment.

:We could go to Dick’s Hallow-Wine party?” she suggests, “Or we could go to The Monster Mash at the Cave?” Cassie and Bart _did_ both explicitly invite her to the Team party. Bart told her he's gotten Jaime to agree to a couples' costume and that it's going to be "the crashest of crash, you have no idea Arty-mis."

It could be less awkward with her and Zee if they had a buffer, but they would probably also make less progress towards making up if they had a buffer too. Artemis doesn’t know what she _wants_ to do, but she knows what she doesn’t want to do. 

“I don’t really want to,” Artemis admits. She wants to hang out with Zee. She wants to work this out and go back to the way that things were before this chasm opened up between them. Zatanna smiles.

“Good, I don't really want to either. I don’t really want to talk to people tonight, you know?” Artemis nods.

"So, does that mean you want to watch movies?" 

"I don't know," Zee says, "I kinda want to do something we've never done before." Artemis sees an idea flash over her face. 

“Wait, you know that thing we always talked about doing for Halloween but never did?”

“Skydiving in costumes?” Artemis asks. Zee rolls her eyes.

“We both know that was a joke.” It _was_ a joke, but it’s also the only thing Artemis could call to mind right now. She also thought that it might help Zee remember the good times that they’ve had over the years, talking about doing dumb fun things and just enjoying each other’s company. The atmosphere right now feels so cold that Artemis is starting to forget what the warmth used to feel like.

“I mean going to an amusement park,” Zee says, “or like, that old boardwalk in Gotham. Something with rides and junk food and costumes.”

“Oh,” Artemis says, “sounds fun.” They quickly agree to zeta over to one of the tubes in Gotham that’s close enough to the old boardwalk to make the walk over in two or three minutes. They pay the five dollar entrance fee to the amusement park boardwalk area. The admission price seems a little high looking at the paint peeling off the Ferris Wheel and all the surrounding rides, but Artemis isn’t going to complain. This place has managed to look like a creepy carnival and never get targeted by the Joker, at least not yet. That’s actually pretty impressive.

They walk around, peaking in the sort of trinket shops that you’d see in a Renaissance Fair beyond the grave. They grab a funnel cake and both eat a few bites before they remember that they don't actually like funnel cake. They watch kids running around, fighting with lightsabers, plastic pirate swords, fake guns, and even some plastic scepters and fairy wands.

“I love how if you give kids something pointy their first urge is to get into lightsaber fights,” Artemis says.

“That’s not just kids,” Zee says, “pretty sure that’s everyone.”

“You think that fifty years old would get into lightsaber fights?”

“Pretty sure fifty year old Wally would,” Zee says, “whenever he had a pool noodle he used it to stab literally everyone.” She’s grinning as she recounts the memory, but then her face contorts. She must have just remembered that Wally is dead and he won’t be alive at fifty, let alone stabbing people with pool noodles.

“I’m sorry,” Zee says, “I didn’t- I didn’t mean to-”

“It’s fine,” Artemis says. It hurts her too, when she realizes that Wally’s never going to get to be an embarrassing middle aged man, listening to her rant about Helen in the PTA and trying to embarrass their kids at baseball games.

“It is?” Zee asks tentatively.

“Can’t stop talking about him forever.” Wally doesn’t get any less dead when she tries her hardest not to talk about him or think about him, and it doesn’t even really keep it from hurting. It just makes her feel bad for refusing to think about him.

Zee nods and looks forward. Artemis doesn’t know if she’s conscious of the fact that she’s avoiding making eye contact.

“Wanna go ride some rides? There’s the Ferris Wheel and some sort of gut scrambler. I think there’s also some spinny thing that like, sticks you to the wall.”

“No offense, but I would literally never get on a ride here. They do _not_ seem up to code.”

“Fair enough,” Zee says.

“Is there anything else here?” Artemis asks, “I mean, we’ve gone through the shops, ate the junk, watched the people, and we don’t wanna do any rides.”

“There’s a haunted house we could do,” Zee says.

“Alright,” Artemis says, “we can check it out.” They walk around the back edge of the property, along the chain link fence border to try to get through the park without having to fight against as much foot traffic. Artemis and Zee pause for a second beside an ugly, warehouse looking building. 

"Do you hear something up there?" Artemis asks. 

"Yeah, it sounds like something's on the roof," Zee says. Artemis immediately looks up and sees something that's not supposed to be there. There’s a kid, probably a middle schooler, standing on the roof, clutching a bucket or something- wait- letting out the contents of a bucket. A liquid comes cascading down from the lily white bucket and she sees the crimson residue all around the areas where it sloshed inside. 

“What are you-” Suddenly, Artemis is hit by a wave of liquid. She’s soaked, and the consistency of it doesn't feel like water. It’s thicker and stickier and- _oh god it’s gross._

“What the fuck?” Artemis asks. She hears giggling from the rooftop, and it sounds like there’s more than one kid. Whatever this prank was, it was a group effort, and that group thinks they’re _hilarious._

“This isn’t funny!” Artemis shouts at the rooftop. She hears more giggling and then she hears noises, lots of loud ones. She’s pretty sure that the kids are running away while the two of them gets their bearings, which is smart. If Artemis _had_ her bearings she’d be telling them off and the leader would probably be shoved against a wall so that she could intimidate him better. 

“Yeah, you better run!” she shouts. She wipes the gunk out of her eyes and looks up at the roof, but she doesn’t see the kids. They might have already gotten away. It’s a good thing that Artemis is actually skilled at tracking. Whenever they went, she’ll be able to find them and tell them that they can’t treat people like that, what the fuck?

“We should go tell those kids off,” Artemis says. Zee takes her hand to her own face, and tries to get the blood out of her eyes.

“Honestly,” Zee says, “I just want to go clean up. This is _disgusting_.” She looks like something out an old, bad horror movie. Zatanna looks like she went for a swim in a bowl of fruit punch.

Artemis starts laughing.

“This is ridiculous,” Artemis says, “what are the chances of getting coated in fake blood by a couple of asshole middle schoolers?” Zee giggles.

“Spiders Artemis and Zee are an outlier and should not have been counted.” The meme’s outdated and it’s not even that funny, but Artemis busts up. She laughs so hard that her sides hurt, and Zatanna joins in.

This feels normal again. Artemis doubts if she’s actually going to go track down those asshole middle schoolers now that she's feeling comfortable just talking with Zee. 

“This feels just like old times, doesn’t it?” Zee asks softly.

“Well,” Artemis says, “except for the fake blood.” Zee cracks a grin.

“There _is_ that.” Zee pauses, and then starts fiddling with her hands, trying to work some of the fake blood off of them. She looks down and watches as she gently rubs. 

“Why didn’t you talk to me after you got back?” she asks softly.

“I wanted to give you space,” Artemis says. Suddenly, it sounds like a weak answer even to her. It's not even anything new. She already told Zee this and she definitely won't be any more impressed this second time. 

"I didn't want space," Zatanna says, continuing to work the fake blood off her hands, "I just wanted to know you still cared about me.”

“Wait, what? You were- you were worried I didn’t care anymore?” Artemis has never been so baffled in her life. How could Zee even think that? Zee looks up from the fake blood on her hands and over to Artemis, but she doesn’t stop softly working them together, rubbing soft circles on her hand.   
  
"You ghosted me for months, didn't tell me you were going undercover and not _actually dying_ , came back, and then I cursed you out and you never contacted me. What was I supposed to think, Mis?"  
  
"I don't know," Artemis admits. She realizes now that the "give Zatanna space" plan had been a bad move.  She bites her lip, and wow, that’s a bad decision when she has nasty fake blood on them. She spits onto the concrete until her mouth tastes normal again.

“You don’t know?” Zee asks skeptically once she’s stopped spitting. Artemis sighs. She thinks that she knows why she did now, but it’s not really something she wants to admit to. She thinks that she has to, though, if she wants a chance to fix this thing with Zee.

“I guess I was worried about talking to you right afterwards because you were so mad. I thought maybe if I gave you time to cool down then it would go better.”

“Then why didn’t you talk to me like two weeks later? Maybe a month? You let like half a year go by, Artemis.”

“I guess I just put it off,” Artemis says, “I got scared and I didn’t ever want to talk about it, ever.” Procrastination feeds procrastination. The longer she puts something off, the harder it gets to do and the easier it gets to make excuses for not doing it.

“I guess I kind of did that too,” Zee admits, “I yelled at you, and then I just never talked to you again. I just- I was so mad at you. And I got madder and madder the longer that we didn’t talk.” Zee sighs.

“Not talking, it kind of lets you make the person into someone that’s just a total dick in your head, you know? You don’t have to think about why they did it or if they meant to hurt you. They’re just a dick and you just get to keep being mad at them without having to think about it.” Artemis grins, and feels a bit of whatever that fake blood is trickle into her mouth. She tastes that nasty, stale taste again and spits it out all over the sidewalk.

Spitting it out is a necessary evil. It looks gross on the sidewalk but it’s grosser in her mouth.

“You alright?” Zee asks. Artemis thinks that she’s probably asking about Artemis's emotional state. Zee didn’t address the first time she spit all over the sidewalk, but it’s a lot easier to address the sidewalk spit that than it is to talk about her feelings.

“Yeah,” Artemis says, “I’m fine. Just got a little in my mouth again.” Zee nods sagely, but she looks a little embarrassed too. Admitting how she'd been approaching the situation seems to have embarrassed her. Artemis realizes that she should probably open up a little more too, just in solidarity.

“I know what you mean,” Artemis says, “you know, about being able to put people in a box. Make them into the bad guy because it’s easier that way?”

“You do?” Zee asks. Artemis chuckles.

“Course I do. Have you met my dad?” Zee cringes in response.

“No, I mean it. I never fucking talk to him because it reminds me that he’s not _just_ a supervillain. Sometimes he was my dad, and sometimes he was kind of good at it.”

She hates having to talk to her dad because she remembers that he’s not _just_ the guy that made her fight her sister until they were both bruised and bloodied and tried to pound her self esteem into the dirt so she’d come crawling back to him instead of becoming a hero.

He’s also the guy that taught her how to use a bow and arrow and told her how proud he was the first time that she hit the target. He’s the one that was there for her when her mom was in prison, that held her when she came home from school crying and told her that she could get through fucking anything because her parents were the strongest people on earth. He was the one that promised her that her mom would get out of prison and be fine because she was a badass, and that Artemis could get through it to because she was just like her badass mother.

It’s a lot harder to make someone into a Saturday morning cartoon villain when you actually talk to them and try to understand them. People are complicated. It's a whole lot easier to just let them be the one dimensional bad guy, especially when they've hurt you so much. Sometimes people being mainly bad but having flashes of humanity makes them so much worse. It definitely makes things harder to navigate. 

“But you’re my friend,” Zatanna says, “I should have, I don’t know, given you the benefit of the doubt?”

“Probably,” Artemis says, “but, well.” She takes a moment to think about how to phrase it.

“I probably could have figured out that you didn’t want space. I should have tried to talk to you after you shouted me out so that we could work things out. I shouldn’t have let it get to this point either.”

“So,” Zee says, “we’re just both shit at talking to each other?" 

“We didn’t used to be,” Artemis points out. And they really didn’t. When she and Zee were on the same team, they were the perfect partners. Zee didn't let her get away with keeping secrets and Artemis didn't let Zee get away with it either.

“I think I ruined it,” Artemis admits.

“What?” Zee asks.

“I took a fucking sledge hammer to what we had." 

“Mis-”

“I ruined it, Zee, not you. You _can_ blame me.” She's not a Saturday morning cartoon villain, but she does feel like she was in the wrong here. Maybe not in the same way that Zatanna thought, but in a different way. Zee bites her lip, and the funny face she makes when trying to get that nasty taste out of her mouth almost takes Artemis out of the serious situation.

“It’s not helpful to blame you, though,” Zee says, “I think I get that now.

“What do you mean?” Artemis asks.

“I’ve been blaming you for months, but that didn’t help. It just made me bitter. I want to be on the same team as you. I want us to be friends again.”

“Oh,” Artemis says, “that’s- that’s great!” She wants to make up too. All she wants right now is her best friend back. She already Wally for good; she doesn’t want to lose Zee forever too

“Let’s just go watch _Nightmare Before Christmas_ and order a pizza,” Artemis suggests/ 

“I want to do that,” Zee says,” I really do, but I think we should shower first.”

“Right,” Artemis says, “good point.” They decide to go back to Artemis’s apartment and take turns with the shower, and then Zee steals a pair of her pajamas and they order pizza and watch their favorite Halloween movies, sprawled out on the couch again like they're both actually comfortable in the space again. 

It’s not fixed yet. They still have a lot of work to do, but Artemis thinks that they’re getting there. She’s glad that they finally had a chance to talk it out.


End file.
